Month: January 2017

The image shows a 180-area multimodal human cortical parcellation on the left and right hemisphere surfaces. Colors indicate the extent to which the areas are associated in the resting state with auditory (red), sensation (green), visual (blue). (The brain, continuing to amaze us.) (credit: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature18933.html)

The brain can reorganize itself in the face of a traumatic injury or a sensory disability. For example, in deaf mammals, the auditory processing neurons of the brain may be rewired to handle other stimuli. But we haven’t been able to figure out if this reorganization is task-specific—will the circuits be recruited to do the same tasks?—or more general.

A recent study published in PNAS suggests that, in at least one case, these brain circuits are repurposed for a similar task. When deaf people were asked to interpret visual rhythms (represented by a flashing light), the same auditory processing regions used to listen to rhythms were activated.

This study used fMRI to look at the brain activation of both congenitally deaf subjects and those with normal hearing. While in the fMRI machine, all subjects were asked to discriminate between different rhythms of flashing lights. As a control, all subjects were also asked to look at a light that flashed with a regular, predictable pattern. Hearing subjects were then asked to discriminate between different auditory rhythms as well. As a control, these subjects were asked to listen to a similar noise occurring in a regular, consistent pattern.

John Carmack, seen here wearing an early prototype Oculus Rift headset.

ZeniMax Media, the parent company of both Bethesda Softworks and Id Software, says it will prove at trial that John Carmack and others at Oculus stole trade secrets to "misappropriate" virtual reality technology that was first developed while Carmack was working at Id Software. What's more, ZeniMax is now accusing Oculus of "intentional destruction of evidence to cover up their wrongdoing." Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Oculus parent company Facebook, is scheduled to respond to those accusations in testimony starting tomorrow, according to a report by Business insider.

"With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas against Defendants Facebook, Oculus and its management, ZeniMax and id Software welcome the opportunity to present substantial evidence of the Defendants' misappropriation of our Virtual Reality (VR) intellectual property," ZeniMax wrote in a statement given to Ars.

"That evidence includes the theft of trade secrets and highly confidential information, including computer code. ZeniMax will also present evidence of the Defendants' intentional destruction of evidence to cover up their wrongdoing. ZeniMax and id Software are the visionary developers of breakthrough VR technology and look forward to the vindication of our claims."

Enlarge / The policy was announced last week by nuclear physicist and DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz, who will be replaced by former Texas Governor Rick Perry if he is confirmed by the Senate. (credit: Thomas Kelsey/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon)

When President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team sent a questionnaire to the Department of Energy asking, among other things, for the names of employees who had worked on anything that touched climate policy, it raised concerns about whether those employees would be targeted. (The transition team later said the questionnaire was “not authorized.") Thanks to a new Department of Energy policy announced last week, that sort of political interference should be (at least a little) harder to do going forward.

The new policy has its roots in a 2009 President Barack Obama memo directing agencies to craft “scientific integrity” policies that protect research staff from having their work censored or altered or prevent researchers being muzzled themselves. Twenty-four departments and agencies have followed through with such policies, but the Department of Energy’s version was a little vague and weak. The newly finalized policy is stronger, earning praise from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The policy now clearly covers all staff at the Department of Energy's 17 national laboratories around the country, including employees of contractors and university researchers funded by DOE grants. They are free to share research findings with the public and other scientists and “are free to discuss their personal opinions on scientific and technical related policies, provided these views are not represented as those of the US Government or DOE.” There are explicit exceptions for classified information given the department’s nuclear work.

AUSTIN, Texas—“We aren't born woke, something wakes us up."

By now, everyone's experienced a newsfeed full of #NoDAPL or long Twitter threads explaining some proposed legislation that threatens a certain cause. With years of social media experience behind us, it's easy for this stuff to feel like white noise. But the next time someone shrugs off any of these posts in the name of social justice as useless, tell them DeRay Mckesson begs to differ. All of it has the ability to help others get "woke," to newly realize there's a problem and a need to combat it. So during his keynote Q&A at the Texas Tribune's weekend symposium on race and policy, the Black Lives Matter activist encouraged everyone to fight toward “equity, justice, and fairness” in the way that works best for them... even if starts as small as a tweet.

For Mckesson, in fact, social media initially proved to be the way of getting involved. Back in August 2014 after the tragic murder of Michael Brown, he wanted to go to Ferguson, Missouri, and merely participate in the peaceful response for a weekend. He had no grand plans of country-wide organizing at the time; then the protests spanned 300 days: “I drove nine hours for a weekend, but I guess it's been a long weekend,” Mckesson said of his work since.

Enlarge (credit: Wisconsin.gov)

With the Paris climate agreement, participating nations have made a commitment to curb greenhouse gas emissions caused by burning of coal, oil, and gas. Removing subsidies for fossil fuels is thought to be one of the most-cost-effective methods of progressing towards that goal. Implementing taxes on these energy sources would go further, but for now, it would be progress if we could just stop making it artificially inexpensive to use fossil fuels.

Unfortunately, it is unclear if these recommendations are being followed, since government self-reporting has been incomplete and unreliable. Without a consistent way to measure these taxes and subsidies, it is difficult to determine whether any progress has been made towards fossil fuel price reform.

Get gas

In a new investigation, a team of researchers used monthly data on retail gasoline prices in countries across the world to determine the net tax or subsidy placed on a liter of gasoline by their governments. Since gasoline is sold directly to consumers in all countries, retail prices provide an indication of underlying costs. And the cost of gasoline is relatively constant; country-to-country differences in gasoline quality are minimal and the price of oil acts as what's effectively a single world reference price. So it's possible to use the data to understand the influence of policy changes on gasoline consumption.

Enlarge / Nearly two-decade-old photos of a suspected child molester matched a 2007 passport photo via a biometrics analysis by the FBI, leading to Charles Hollin's arrest in Oregon. (credit: FBI / Aurich Lawson)

A fugitive suspected of molesting a 10-year-old Indiana girl 17 years ago has been arrested after the Federal Bureau of Investigation employed facial recognition technology, according to court documents. The bureau said the suspect's US passport photo in December was run though a Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) test, and it matched photos taken before he disappeared nearly two decades ago.

Charles Hollin, 61, was arrested in Salem, Oregon last week at a Walmart where he works. He had both Minnesota and Oregon driver's licenses with his picture on them. The agency said it did not perform a biometrics analysis with those databases because they have not opened up their DMV roles for the bureau to search. The bureau noted in a court filing that the government maintains "top secret" databases containing biometric profiles.

"The Department of Motor Vehicles for Minnesota and Oregon were not searched due to the fact that it was prohibited by law. Additional searches were conducted in various federal secret and top secret databases. All of these searches were negative," Todd Prewitt, an FBI agent, wrote in court documents (PDF).

Enlarge / Raspberry Pi's upgraded Compute Module. (credit: Raspberry Pi Foundation)

The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is getting a big upgrade, with the same processor used in the recently released Raspberry Pi 3.

The Compute Module, which is intended for industrial applications, was first released in April 2014 with the same CPU as the first-generation Raspberry Pi. The upgrade announced today has 1GB of RAM and a Broadcom BCM2837 processor that can run at up to 1.2HGz. "This means it provides twice the RAM and roughly ten times the CPU performance of the original Compute Module," the Raspberry Pi Foundation announcement said.

This is the second major version of the Compute Module, but it's being called the "Compute Module 3" to match the last flagship Pi's version number.

(credit: Neilson Barnard / Getty Images)

Lee Jae-yong, the vice chairman of Samsung Group and acting head of the company, could soon be facing formal corruption charges. South Korean prosecutors are currently seeking the arrest of the Samsung heir, accusing him of bribery, embezzlement, and perjury. The warrant must first be approved by a court, which will convene Wednesday.

The accusation sucks Samsung into the ongoing corruption scandal that has rocked South Korea, where impeachment hearings for President Park Geun-hye have already started. Lee is accused of paying bribes to a nonprofit connected to the South Korean president in exchange for approval of a merger of two Samsung Group affiliates—Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T—in 2015. Once merged, the two companies became one of the largest investors in Samsung Electronics, solidifying the Lee family's control over the crown jewel of the Samsung empire. The prosecutor's office estimated that the total size of the alleged bribes was ₩43 billion ($36 million).

The possible arrest of Lee comes at a time when Samsung is still sorting through the Note 7 recall debacle, and it could interrupt Lee Jae-yong's massive ongoing reorganization of Samsung Group.